Hard drive caught on fire

[wylackii]

My hard drive caught on fire recently. Free tip, when closing a cheap plastic case, it tends to grab at cables (i.e. SATA power cables) and leaves the cables plugged in enough to cause damage. Good cable management is a must.

Anyway, I bought two hard drives for two systems I was planning on giving away until the mishap. I was wondering, should I remove the HD controller from the good drive and put it on long enough to mirror the the bad HD to a good drive or should I just toss the drive and reinstall from scratch.
I am on dial-up, so all of those half-life games I am putting on one machine did take some effort to get using Steam (a lot of mooching/paid Internet borrowing), on the other hand I could just leave the games off and start over from scratch.
Is it worth it to use the good controller to save the data on the bad drive or am I risking both drives? I plan on tossing the bad drive after I am done, it is 250 GB and I most likely will not miss it.

[Force Flow]

With more modern drives, swapping circuit boards isn't advisable. Older drives simply had a connector for the wires leading into the drive itself, so that made a swap easy. These days, they're soldered to the board. I can't say I've done a swap since that change was made, but the from the drives I needed to destroy and discard, the board certainly does not come off cleanly. So, yes, you would most likely end up with two duds.

[wylackii]

Thank you, it looked straightforward as to removing and reattaching. But I have heard two sides to that story. One, it can be done but might cause problems with indexing. Two, not worth it.
I am running a Win 7 RC with a couple games for my nephew. I think I will only install games that have a disc and borrow just enough Internet to run updates. I will have to find out if HL2 episodes can be dragged and dropped from my old computer to a new computer without having to download the entire thing.

[Force Flow]

Originally Posted by wylackii One, it can be done but might cause problems with indexing.

Problems with indexing? First I've ever heard anything like that. No, you will not have problems with indexing. All data, including the MFT are located on the platters of the drive. The circuit board merely contains instructions on how to operate the drive, the SMART alert system, and model & serial number information. That's why swapping the circuit boards on drives does work (when the darn things aren't soldered to the drive)